With only nine months to go, in the fashion of modern presidents, Barack Obama is already planning his post-presidential library, museum, and foundation complex. Such institutions only seem to grow more opulent and imperial as the years and administrations pass. Obama’s will reportedly leave the $300 million raised for George W. Bush’s version of the same in the dust. The aim is to create at least an $800 million and possibly billion-dollar institution. With his post-Oval Office future already in view and his presidency nearly history, his “legacy” has clearly been on his mind of late. And when it comes to foreign policy, he definitely has some accomplishments to brag about. The two most obvious are the Iran nuclear deal and the opening to Cuba. In their own ways, both could prove game changers, breaking with venomous relations that lasted, in the case of Iran, for more than three and a half decades, and in the case of Cuba, for more than half a century.

You can already imagine the exhibits celebrating them at the Barack Obama Presidential Center to be built on the south side of Chicago. But it's hard not to wonder how that institution will handle the three major foreign policy promises the new president made in the distant days of 2008-2009. After all, he was, in part, swept into the presidency on a blunt promise to end George W. Bush’s catastrophic war in Iraq. (“So when I am Commander-in-Chief, I will set a new goal on Day One: I will end this war.”) Nine years later, he’s once again taken this country into the Big Muddy of an Iraq War, either the third or fourth of them in the last five presidencies (depending on whether you count the Reagan administration support for Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran in the 1980s). At this moment, having just dispatched B-52s, the classic Vietnam-era carpet-bombing plane of choice (Ted Cruz must be thrilled!) to Qatar as part of that war effort, and being on a mission-creep path ever deeper into what can only be called the Iraq quagmire, we're likely to be talking about a future museum exhibit from hell.

But it won’t begin to match the special exhibit that will someday undoubtedly explore the president’s heartfelt promise to work to severely curtail the American and global nuclear arsenals and put the planet on a path to -- a word that had never previously hovered anywhere near the Oval Office -- nuclear abolition. The president’s disarmament ambitions were, in fact, significantly responsible for his 2009 Nobel Prize, an honor that almost uniquely preceded any accomplishments. Now, the same man is presiding over a planned three-decade, trillion-dollar renovation and modernization of that same arsenal, including the development of an initial generation of “smart” nukes, potentially first-use weapons. It’s certainly been a unique path for our first outright anti-nuclear president to take and deserves a special place of (dis)honor at the future Obama center.

Barring surprising developments in the coming months, however, no exhibit is likely to be more striking or convoluted than the one that will have to be dedicated to the "closing" of Guantánamo, the notorious offshore, Bush-era prison camp. After all, as TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, a striking soon-to-be-published anatomy of post-9/11 national security state mania, points out today, the closing of Guantánamo within a year represented one of the president’s first promises on entering the Oval Office. Unless somehow he succeeds in shutting Gitmo down over fierce Republican congressional opposition in these final months, it could prove the pièce de résistance of his future museum. Tom

Still in the Bush Embrace

What Really Stands in the Way of Closing Guantánamo

By Karen J. Greenberg

Can you believe it? We’re in the last year of the presidency of the man who, on his first day in the Oval Office, swore that he would close Guantánamo, and yet it and everything it represents remains part of our all-American world. So many years later, you can still read news reports on the ongoing nightmares of that grim prison, ranging from detention without charge to hunger strikes and force feeding. Its name still echoes through the halls of Congress in bitter debate over what should or shouldn’t be done with it. It remains a global symbol of the worst America has to offer.

In case, despite the odds, it should be closed in this presidency, Donald Trump has already sworn to reopen it and “load it up with bad dudes,” while Ted Cruz has warned against returning the naval base on which it’s located to the Cubans. In short, that prison continues to haunt us like an evil spirit. While President Obama remains intent on closing it, he continues to make the most modest and belated headway in reducing its prisoner population, while a Republican Congress remains no less determined to keep it open. With nine months left until a new president is inaugurated, the question is: Can this country’s signature War on Terror prison ever be closed?

The “Forever Detainees”

Here then is a little dismal history of a place most Americans would prefer not even to think about.

In January 2002, President George W. Bush opened the Guantánamo Bay Detention facility. It was to hold, in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase, the “worst of the worst” in the War on Terror. Over time, its population rose to nearly 800 prisoners from 44 countries, some captured in Afghanistan, some traded for bounty payments by vindictive neighbors or hostile tribesmen, and some seized by CIA operatives in countries far from Taliban territory. The prison then held more al-Qaeda and Taliban followers than leaders, but many prisoners were neither: they had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Recognizing this, within a few years the Bush administration sent more than 500 of the detainees back to their countries of origin or to other countries willing to accept them.

Then, in 2006, Bush made the lie of Guantánamo a reality. His administration finally transferred “the worst of the worst” to the by-then-notorious island prison. Those 16 individuals included five who stood accused of participating in the 9/11 conspiracy, and others who were believed responsible for devastatingly lethal attacks against American targets in the 1990s, including the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in 2000. All had been held for years in CIA custody in “black sites” in countries around the world. All had been subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which was, of course, the administration's (and, in those years, the media's) euphemism for some of the oldest torture practices known.

That move would prove a game changer. Instead of Guantánamo’s population shrinking into irrelevance and dwindling into obscurity, as it should have, the prison for the first time became exactly what Rumsfeld had promised it would be: a place for the most notorious al-Qaeda “high value detainees” (HVDs) that the U.S. held. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the “mastermind” of 9/11, and four others allegedly involved in planning or carrying out the attacks on New York and Washington were among them.

That same fall, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act aimed at assuring that Guantánamo would be a site not only for offshore detention, but for offshore justice as well. At some future point, Mohammed and the others were to be tried by the U.S. military in Cuba, not in American civilian courts in the U.S. For the first time, the military commissions, like the high value detainees, seemed to give Guantánamo definition (other than simply as a site of abuse, mistreatment, and injustice) and the possibility, in the context of the war on terror, of forward momentum. Those not released could now be tried. And yet by the end of the Bush years, only three prisoners, none of them HVDs, had been successfully convicted -- fewer, in other words, than the five who died in custody there in those years.

That should have been revealing enough for conclusions to be drawn. It turned out that even a secretive, militarized, legally compromised system of “justice” couldn’t successfully bring to trial individuals involved in the crime that launched the new century, when the major evidence against them often came from brutal forms of torture. As a result, most of the Guantánamo detainees had settled into a familiar state of limbo by the time Barack Obama took office in January 2009. At the time, 242 detainees were still in custody there and those military trials were going nowhere fast. The new president arrived on a white horse, full of promises about ending the stasis at Guantánamo and ready to make sense of things. He promptly promised to close the prison for good and suspended the military commissions.

That left the problem of somehow resolving the unsettled status of the various detainees then in custody at Gitmo, individuals who essentially fell into three categories: those deemed not to pose a danger to the U.S. who were to be released; those considered too dangerous for release but -- thanks to tortured testimony -- not prosecutable even in military courts and were to be kept in indefinite detention (a group Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg aptly termed “forever prisoners”); and those who would someday be tried by some version of the suspended military commissions.

By the summer of his first year in office, Obama had announced that he would accept the distinctly un-American reality of indefinite detention and the military commissions as well, although in a new form still to be legislated by Congress. From then on, his presidency would remain eerily locked in the embrace of the Bush administration on Guantánamo and, promises or no, one thing was quickly clear: the president was not about to go out on a limb for the Gitmo detainees; he had other things to tend to (like a health-care proposal). Meanwhile, a task force appointed by the president determined that 48 detainees should indeed be kept in indefinite detention, 36 prosecuted, and the rest released via transfers to other countries.

Shrinking Gitmo

Given his promises, it was not exactly a record to feel proud of, but in his seven years in office, President Obama has at least made some headway in terms of the sheer size of the Gitmo population. Admittedly, the pace of releases has been abysmally slow. Dozens of prisoners have been declared no longer dangerous and yet left to languish in their cells. Meanwhile, diplomatic negotiations for their resettlement in countries neither so fragile that terrorism is a daily reality, nor likely to abuse them further dragged on (while congressional Republicans continue to fight on tooth and nail to keep them in place). Still, today there are “only” 80 remaining detainees, a third of the population in January 2009. Twenty-six of those have been cleared for release but are still awaiting transfer years later, while 44 continue to be held without charges in indefinite detention. Nine face actual charges before the military commissions.

Whatever the reduction in numbers, however, the camp stands essentially as it did under Bush, a monument to bad memories. It still has dozens of individuals locked away in a grim state of hopelessness, some cleared for release but doubting their transfers will ever occur, others having given up entirely and on hunger strikes -- essentially trying to commit suicide.

Theoretically, the pace of resettlement for those already cleared for release could be speeded up and the Periodic Review Board, charged with deciding if an individual no longer poses a danger to this country, could meet more frequently to agree on releases among the relatively small number of detainees whose futures are still undetermined. Were that to happen (and it might), within months the population of Gitmo could be reduced to a relatively few detainees.

It’s worth noting that U.S. taxpayers continue to ante up a pretty penny to maintain Gitmo and its shrinking group of inmates in its present state. The cost to keep a detainee there in 2015 is estimated at between $3.7 million and $4.2 million a year. Were that population to be reduced significantly, those millions of dollars per detainee would only skyrocket up. The smaller the number remaining there and the higher the cost per head, the more likely that even a reluctant Congress might eventually agree to move them to the U.S., although “closing Guantánamo” will then mean bringing Gitmo practices -- indefinite detention without charges, the most fundamental violation of due process imaginable -- to the mainland.

Regressive Justice

That would leave one thing and one thing alone standing in the way of Guantánamo’s official end: the military commissions, and that would indeed be ironic. After all, unlike indefinite detention or torture, those commissions are a recognizable, if flawed, part of the American legal tradition, used during both the Civil War and the Second World War.

They have been marked by failure from the outset. The commissions were not initially on the minds of the Bush administration lawyers and officials who organized the war on terror, set up that Cuban outpost, and enhanced those classic torture “techniques.” In fact, offshore detention was meant to skirt the U.S. justice system almost entirely and get information from the captured men by any means necessary. The goal was clear enough: to fill in for the unfortunate lack of knowledge American intelligence services had about Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda network, their hideouts and training camps.

To give themselves leeway in terms of prisoner interrogation and treatment, the administration refused to consider those held there as prisoners of war (POWs), for fear that methods of interrogation would be restricted by the Geneva Conventions. Instead, they coined a term, “enemy combatants,” to create a category beyond the bounds of legality. To this day, U.S. officials speak of the remaining detainees at Gitmo as neither “prisoners” nor POWs.

Soon after the prison was set up, the Bush administration referred 24 of those “enemy combatants” to an ad hoc process which they began to call “military commissions” -- until, in June 2006, the Supreme Court declared them invalid unless authorized by Congress (which then dutifully and hastily passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006).

All these years later, only eight prisoners have been convicted under the commissions that were suspended and then revived by Obama. Three of them, convicted before he took office, have since had their charges vacated or overturned. Put another way, you could say that the commissions are regressing in their goal to clear Gitmo’s cases. Once able to claim eight convictions, they can now count only five, and in the months to come, depending on a future decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, that number may be reduced further. In sum, the commissions have shown not the slightest progress when it comes to the mission of closing Gitmo.

There are, of course, federal courts in the U.S. with much experience in trying terror cases and a 100% conviction rate when it comes to major ones. To give Obama administration officials some credit, they did initially want to dump the military commissions for trials on the mainland and even moved one high value detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, to the federal courthouse in New York City. While his trial did result in a jury conviction on a single charge and a sentence of life without parole, the trial itself was seen by those who prefer to keep Gitmo open as proof that terrorists do stand a chance of going free in federal courts. Much of the evidence against Ghailani, tainted by torture, was excluded from the trial. While the jury knew neither about his torture nor the fact that he had been held at Guantánamo, Ghailani was acquitted on 283 of 284 counts. In a situation in which the phrase “courage of your convictions” would never be brought to bear, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder backed down amid a torrent of criticism, and the military commissions continued at Guantánamo.

And yet for anyone hoping to see that prison closed in our lifetimes, sooner or later the idea of transferring those formally charged with terrorism to the federal courts will have to be revived. The place of choice, were this to happen, should probably be a courthouse relatively close to the White House: the Eastern District Court of Virginia (EDVA). It has, since 9/11, overseen a variety of high-profile terror cases, including those of Zacarias Moussaoui, John Walker Lindh, and Abu Ali.

It is also an inside-the-Beltway courthouse; its judges and prosecutors are familiar with using intelligence-related classified information. It is near the Department of Justice and can call on the expertise of officials at the FBI, CIA, and elsewhere who have been working on these cases for years. Finally, it has earned a reputation as the “rocket docket,” a fast-paced venue that tries such cases with speed -- and given how long these trials have been postponed, speed is an important consideration.

Closing Gitmo?

There are a variety of ways that the EDVA could receive cases from the military commissions, ranging from a presidential act in defiance of a Congressional ban on transferring any Gitmo prisoners to the U.S. to actual congressional authorization. There is, however, one man who could make all of this far more likely and that’s Brigadier General Mark Martins, the chief prosecutor of the Office of Military Commissions since 2011. With soldierly loyalty, a sharp legal mind, and a charismatic public demeanor, Martins has for six long years defended the ability of the Guantánamo commissions to succeed as constitutionally and legally valid courts with built-in protections and procedures that approach those of federal criminal courts. He has the power to declare the commissions no longer viable, leaving the administration with little choice but to close them. Were he to do so, it would be a game-changer.

A former adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq and Afghanistan and co-chair of the task force that revived the commissions after Obama came into office, he has suffered one setback after another. In these years, he has been blindsided by the CIA’s attempts to spy on the commission’s Gitmo courtroom, as well as on the rooms where attorneys meet the defendants they represent. He’s been stopped in his tracks by federal courts that declared the main charges against the detainees he was trying “unlawful”; embarrassed by the mysterious transfer of defense counsel materials to the prosecution’s computers; and humiliated, month after month, by the failure to deliver on the promise he made that the commission’s procedures in their “fundamental guarantees of a fair and just trial” would be “comparable to trials in federal courts." Those procedures have instead proven to be a farce.

Were General Martins to finally accept the reality of Gitmo -- that, given its history, nothing there can truly resemble justice -- he might be able to lead even a recalcitrant Republican Congress, the administration in its last days, and the American public to the only realistic conclusion: that the military commissions will never work and it’s finally time to shut Gitmo down. After all, it is hard to imagine any system that would do worse than the one that, for a decade, has failed even to begin the trials of the men charged as perpetrators of 9/11.

Those attacks left an open wound that will not heal, not without actual justice. For the sake of the victims’ families, for the ability of the country to move on, for the very confidence of the nation in its judicial system, those defendants need to be tried and Guantánamo has proven itself incapable of doing so.

Still, all of us have to face another possibility: that the prison will not be closed in what’s left of the Obama years or in the presidency to follow; that this country will instead be left in the twilight zone of Gitmo and in a world where its values are the ones eternally associated with America; and that we will continue to be known as a nation willing to avoid justice, if not deny it outright. Even at this late date, closing Gitmo and moving the military commission trials back to federal court would help heal the wound that the war on terror inflicted on the country’s deepest identity -- as a nation of justice for all.

Karen J. Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and author of The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days. Her latest book, Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown Publishers), will be published in May. Andrew Dalack, a research fellow at the Center on National Security, helped with this article.

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To most Americans, the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany slips by unnoticed. To Pavel Elfimov, it’s among the biggest holidays of the year.

Ask any Russian about their family’s World War II experiences and the answer, almost invariably, is one of suffering and battlefield service. Unlike the United States, which had two oceans that largely insulated it from attack after Pearl Harbor, Russia was besieged, bombed, invaded and re-invaded during World War II. Then the Red Army swept toward Berlin and played a key role in toppling Adolf Hitler.

“You have Thanksgiving. We have Victory Day,” said Elfimov, 44, who came with his family this week to a nighttime rehearsal for Moscow’s annual Victory Day Parade. The procession is a bristling display of military might that sweeps down some of the capital’s most exclusive streets before rolling through Red Square in front of the Kremlin elite.

Russian President Vladimir Putin revived the Soviet-style tank parade in 2008, seeing the day as a way to rally citizens around the flag. But despite the hundreds of missile launchers, warplanes and antiaircraft guns that roll through Red Square every year, many Russians say that the true meaning of the holiday is more personal, 71 years after the end of the war.

“In Russia there are very few families who weren’t touched by it,” said Elfimov, who added that both of his grandfathers fought in the war and that one of them died shortly afterward, his resilience destroyed by combat.

Of more than two dozen people approached at the rehearsal, all had a parent, grandparent or great-grandparent who fought in the war. Most said at least one direct ancestor died in the fighting. Soviet losses were immense — most historians estimate the Soviet death toll between 27 million and 28 million people — and the oldest generation of Russians still has aching memories of wartime starvation.

“It was impossible,” said Irina Kravchenko, 60, who said that 300 of the 500 people living in her small town in the Ural Mountains at the time of the war headed off to combat. Her grandfather never came home from the fighting, she said, a memory she wanted to make sure she passed down to her grandchild, who along with her daughter-in-law was watching soldiers on antiaircraft missile systems prepare for the parade.

“The memory of service was so tough. There was an inner strength,” Kravchenko said about the townspeople who returned from war. “They didn’t like to talk about their experiences.”

World War II tends to be remembered in the United States as a victory by Americans, with the Red Army acting more or less as an adjunct. Russian memories are focused on their own sacrifices. As the veterans have died, their children and grandchildren have started to march on Victory Day, holding their photos, separately from the martial parades. That started as a nonpolitical movement in 2012, and has since been embraced by the Kremlin.

Operation Condor was a covert, multinational “black operations” program organized by six Latin American states (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, later joined by Ecuador and Peru), with logistical, financial, and intelligence support from Washington.

In the Cold War climate of the 1960s and ’70s, when U.S. leaders and Latin American militaries regarded popular movements and political dissidents as “internal enemies,” any methods were considered legitimate in the “war against subversion.” In fact, many of these new social movements were indigenous nationalist, leftist, socialist, or radically democratic forces fighting to represent the voiceless and the marginalized.

As leftist and nationalist leaders won elections throughout Latin America in the 1960s and early 1970s, and new revolutionary and progressive movements gained strength, U.S. security strategists feared a communist-inspired threat to U.S. economic and political interests in the hemisphere. Local elites similarly feared that their traditional political dominance and wealth were at risk. Washington poured enormous resources into the inter-American security system, of which Condor was a top-secret part, to mobilize and unify the militaries in order to prevent leftist leaders from taking power and to control and destroy leftist and popular movements in Latin America. Anticommunism and “preventing another Cuba” were the national security priorities of the U.S. in Latin America.

The reigning national security doctrine incorporated counterinsurgency strategies and concepts such as “hunter-killer” programs and secret, “unconventional” techniques such as subversion, sabotage, and terrorism to defeat foes. Much of counterinsurgency doctrine is classified, but scholars have documented many of its key components. Michael McClintock, for example, analyzed a classified U.S. Army Special Forces manual of December 1960 Counter-Insurgency Operations, one of the earliest to mention explicitly, in its section "Terror Operations," the use of counterinsurgent terror as a legitimate tactic. He cites other secret U.S. army special operations handbooks from the 1960s that endorsed "counterterror," including assassination and abduction, in certain situations. One March 1961 article in Military Review stated, "Political warfare, in short, is warfare. . .[that] embraces diverse forms of coercion and violence including strikes and riots, economic sanctions, subsidies for guerrilla or proxy warfare and, when necessary, kidnapping or assassination of enemy elites.” In short, “disappearance” was a key element of counterinsurgency doctrine.

Operation Condor was a multinational system to specifically target exiles who had escaped the wave of military coups and dictatorships in their own countries. Thousands of Argentines, Uruguayans, and Brazilians fled to Chile in the early 1970s when the progressive Unidad Popular government was in power. After the September 1973 CIA-backed coup against President Salvador Allende, thousands escaped to Argentina. Operation Condor focused on these people — many of whom were under United Nations protection — using covert, cross-border abduction-disappearance, “rendition” to other countries, torture, and extrajudicial execution.

Condor’s targets were activists, organizers, and opponents of the dictatorships, as well as guerrillas or armed insurgents (all of whom were entitled to due process and freedom from torture). Exiles were considered dangerous enemies by the regimes because of their powerful influence in the developing global human rights movement. The Chilean exiles, for instance — some 200,000 Chileans were forced out of the country in the first years after the coup — were pioneers in organizing solidarity and anti-dictatorship groups worldwide, providing information to the U.N. and human rights groups, and transmitting through their music and art the hopes and promise of the Unidad Popular.

Under a top-secret agreement known as “Phase III” Condor also assassinated, or attempted to assassinate, key political opposition leaders exiled in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Special teams of assassins from member countries were formed to travel worldwide to eliminate “subversive enemies”— political leaders who could organize and lead pro-democracy movements against the military regimes. One Condor assassination targeted former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, a prominent critic of the Pinochet regime. He and his U.S. colleague Ronni Moffitt were murdered in a 1976 car bombing in Washington, D.C. Other targets included constitutionalist Chilean general Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, assassinated in Buenos Aires (1974), and two Uruguayan legislators and opponents of the Uruguayan military regime, Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, disappeared, tortured, and killed in Buenos Aires (1976). Washington and its Latin American allies feared elected leftist leaders as much, if not more, than revolutionary guerrillas in the region, as the plots against Presidents Goulart of Brazil and Allende, among others, demonstrated.

In 1973 or early 1974, before the Condor apparatus acquired its code name and formal structure, the counterinsurgents created the prototype of Condor. A February 1974 meeting took place in Buenos Aires to plan deeper collaboration of the police of six South American states. Between 1973 and 1975 cross-border disappearances and forcible, extralegal transfers of exiles (“renditions”) by multinational Condor squadrons intensified under an unwritten agreement enabling the associated militaries to pursue individuals who had fled to neighboring countries. This was the essence of Condor, as yet unnamed.

Chilean colonel Manuel Contreras, head of the fearsome Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), was a key Condor organizer. He called for a founding meeting in Santiago to institutionalize the Condor prototype in 1975. In 2000, the CIA acknowledged that Contreras had been paid by the CIA between 1974 and 1977, a period when the Condor network was planning and carrying out assassinations in Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

In 1974 a Uruguayan abduction-disappearance squadron took up residence in Buenos Aires and worked with its Argentine and Chilean counterparts to “disappear,” torture, interrogate, and illegally transfer exiles. Selected Uruguayan navy units began to coordinate secret repressive actions with personnel from the notorious Argentine Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) in 1974, and an ESMA delegation traveled to Uruguay that year to train officers in torture techniques in counterinsurgency courses. In an emblematic case, Uruguayan exile Antonio Viana was kidnapped from his home in Buenos Aires by a joint Argentine-Uruguayan squad, taken to the federal police headquarters, and tortured by Uruguayan officers he recognized. Viana soon realized that the squad included officers from the Argentine Federal Police and the Uruguayan Organismo Coordinador de Operaciones Antisubversivas (OCOA) and Dirección Nacional de Información e Inteligencia (DNII). In the Argentine federal police headquarters, La Superintendencia de Seguridad Federal, Viana was tortured both physically and psychologically. Viana testified that his torturers and interrogators included Argentine police officers Miguel Angel Iñiguiz and Alberto Villar and Uruguayans Carlos Calcagno, José Gavazzo, Hugo Campos Hermida, Jorge Silveira, and Víctor Castiglioni, names that are infamous in Uruguay. Viana's case is one of many confirming that Condor was operative long before its official founding meeting in November 1975, thus highlighting the importance of the February 1974 meeting in Buenos Aires. Viana was transported back to Uruguay where he remained “disappeared” for years (he survived).

Documents discovered in Argentina show that the Chilean DINA and Argentine intelligence agencies were working together in 1974 to abduct members of the Chilean Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) and the so-called OPR-33 of Uruguay in Argentina. Condor officers in Argentina used an abandoned auto repair shop, Orletti Motors — code-named OT [Operaciones Tácticas] 18 — as a secret torture and detention center for foreign detainees. Survivors reported seeing Bolivians, Chileans, Uruguayans, as well as two young security guards from the Cuban embassy in Argentina, imprisoned and tortured there. Most were killed.

Recent testimonies, such as that of Brazilian coronel Paulo Malhaes, who appeared before Brazil’s Comisión de la Verdad, provided confirmation of joint covert operations by Brazil’s Centro de Informaciones del Ejército and Argentine Batallón 601 de Inteligencia de Campo de Mayo against Argentines who were in Rio. Malhaes confessed to following and “disappearing” many Argentines, some who were protected by the U.N. and others who were members of the Montoneros. Malhaes died of a heart attack in 2014 after three men broke into his house and held him hostage for ten hours, ransacking the place and taking files and weapons.

Condor, “officially” institutionalized in November 1975, filled a crucial function in the inter-American counterinsurgency regime. While the militaries carried out massive repression within their own countries, the transnational Condor system silenced individuals and groups that had escaped the dictatorships to prevent them from organizing politically or influencing public opinion. The anticommunist mission, of which Condor was a part, ultimately crushed democratic as well as radical movements and individuals. Condor was not solely a Latin American (or Chilean) initiative; nor was it a simple instrument of Washington. Condor was secret component of the continental counterinsurgency regime. The militaries’ use of “disappearance” was central for carrying out covert counterinsurgency wars, provoking terror, and at the same time providing plausible deniability — the ability to camouflage links to the state and create impunity.

Justice is still pending for many crimes committed under the Condor system.

J. Patrice McSherry is author of Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (2005) and many other works on Operation Condor.

]]>EnglishTue, 26 May 2015 00:57:46 -0500Twenty-six Things About the Islamic State (ISIL)http://discrepando.com/english/item/7131-twenty-six-things-about-the-islamic-state-isil-that-obama-does-not-want-you-to-know-about
http://discrepando.com/english/item/7131-twenty-six-things-about-the-islamic-state-isil-that-obama-does-not-want-you-to-know-about

The US led war against the Islamic State is a big lie.

Going after ” Islamic terrorists”, carrying out a worldwide pre-emptive war to “Protect the American Homeland” are used to justify a military agenda.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is a creation of US intelligence. Washington’s “Counter-terrorism Agenda” in Iraq and Syria consists in Supporting the Terrorists.

The incursion of the Islamic State (IS) brigades into Iraq starting in June 2014 was part of a carefully planned military-intelligence operation supported covertly by the US, NATO and Israel.

The counter-terrorism mandate is a fiction. America is the Number One “State Sponsor of Terrorism”

The Islamic State is protected by the US and its allies. If they had wanted to eliminate the Islamic State brigades, they could have “carpet” bombed their convoys of Toyota pickup trucks when they crossed the desert from Syria into Iraq in June.

The Syro-Arabian Desert is open territory (see map below). With state of the art jet fighter aircraft (F15, F22 Raptor, CF-18) it would have been -from a military standpoint- a rapid and expedient surgical operation

In this article, we address 26 concepts which refute the big lie. Portrayed by the media as a humanitarian undertaking, this large scale military operation directed against Syria and Iraq has resulted in countless civilian deaths.

It could not have been undertaken without the unbending support of the Western media which has upheld Obama’s initiative as a counter-terrorism operation.

THE HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF AL QAEDA

1. The US has supported Al Qaeda and its affiliated organizations for almost half a century since the heyday of the Soviet Afghan war.

2. CIA training camps were set up in Pakistan. In the ten year period from 1982 to 1992, some 35,000 jihadists from 43 Islamic countries were recruited by the CIA to fight in the Afghan jihad.

“Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the Jihad.”

3. Since the Reagan Administration, Washington has supported the Islamic terror network.

Ronald Reagan called the terrorists “freedom fighters”. The US supplied weapons to the Islamic brigades. It was all for “a good cause”: fighting the Soviet Union and regime change, leading to the demise of a secular government in Afghanistan.

4. Jihadist textbooks were published by the University of Nebraska. “. “The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings”

5. Osama bin Laden, America’s bogyman and founder of Al Qaeda was recruited by the CIA in 1979 at the very outset of the US sponsored jihadist war against Afghanistan . He was 22 years old and was trained in a CIA sponsored guerilla training camp.

Al Qaeda was not behind the 9/11 Attacks. September 11, 2001 provided a justification for waging a war against Afghanistan on the grounds that Afghanistan was a state sponsor of terrorism, supportive of Al Qaeda. The 9/11 attacks were instrumental in the formulation of the “Global War on Terrorism”.

THE ISLAMIC STATE (ISIL)

6. The Islamic State (ISIL) was originally an Al Qaeda affiliated entity created by US intelligence with the support of Britain’s MI6, Israel’s Mossad, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Presidency (GIP), Ri’āsat Al-Istikhbārāt Al-’Āmah ( رئاسةالاستخباراتالعامة‎).

7. The ISIL brigades were involved in the US-NATO supported insurgency in Syria directed against the government of Bashar al Assad.

8. NATO and the Turkish High Command were responsible for the recruitment of ISIL and Al Nusrah mercenaries from the outset of the Syrian insurgency in March 2011. According to Israeli intelligence sources, this initiative consisted in:

“a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels. The Turkish army would house these volunteers, train them and secure their passage into Syria. (DEBKAfile, NATO to give rebels anti-tank weapons, August 14, 2011.)

9.There are Western Special Forces and Western intelligence operatives within the ranks of the ISIL. British Special Forces and MI6 have been involved in training jihadist rebels in Syria.

10. Western military specialists on contract to the Pentagon have trained the terrorists in the use of chemical weapons.

“The United States and some European allies are using defense contractors to train Syrian rebels on how to secure chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, a senior U.S. official and several senior diplomats told CNN Sunday. ( CNN Report, December 9, 2012)

11. The ISIL’s practice of beheadings is part of the US sponsored terrorist training programs implemented in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

12. Recruited by America’s ally, a large number of ISIL mercenaries are convicted criminals released from Saudi prisons on condition they join the ISIL. Saudi death row inmates were recruited to join the terror brigades.

13. Israel has supported the ISIL and Al Nusrah brigades out of the Golan Heights.

Jihadist fighters have met Israeli IDF officers as well as Prime Minister Netanyahu. The IDF top brass tacitly acknowledges that “global jihad elements inside Syria” [ISIL and Al Nusrah] are supported by Israel. See image below:

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon next to a wounded mercenary, Israeli military field hospital at the occupied Golan Heights’ border with Syria, 18 February 2014″

SYRIA AND IRAQ

14 The ISIL are the foot soldiers of the Western military alliance. Their unspoken mandate is to wreck havoc and destruction in Syria and Iraq, acting on behalf of their US sponsors.

15. US Senator John McCain has met up with jihadist terrorist leaders in Syria.

16 The Islamic State (IS) militia, which is currently the alleged target of a US-NATO bombing campaign under a “counter-terrorism” mandate, continues to be supported covertly by the US. Washington and its allies continue to provide military aid to the Islamic State.

17. US and allied bombings are not targeting the ISIL, they are bombing the economic infrastructure of Iraq and Syria including factories and oil refineries.

18. The IS caliphate project is part of a longstanding US foreign policy agenda to carve up Iraq and Syria into separate territories: A Sunni Islamist Caliphate, an Arab Shia Republic, a Republic of Kurdistan.

THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERRORISM (GWOT)

19. “The Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) is presented as a “Clash of Civilizations”, a war between competing values and religions, when in reality it is an outright war of conquest, guided by strategic and economic objectives.

20 U.S. sponsored Al Qaeda terror brigades (covertly supported by Western intelligence) have been deployed in Mali, Niger, Nigeria, the Central African Republic, Somalia and Yemen.

America’s “War on Terrorism” By Mchel Chossudovsky

These various affiliated Al Qaeda entities in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are CIA sponsored “intelligence assets”. They are used by Washington to wreck havoc, create internal conflicts and destabilize sovereign countries.

21 Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al Shabab in Somalia, the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) (supported by NATO in 2011), Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Jemaah Islamiah (JI) in Indonesia, among other Al Qaeda affiliated groups are supported covertly by Western intelligence.

22. The US is also supporting Al Qaeda affiliated terrorist organizations in the Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region of China. The underlying objective is to trigger political instability in Western China.

Chinese jihadists are reported to have received “terrorist training” from the Islamic State “in order to conduct attacks in China”. The declared objective of these Chinese-based jihadist entities (which serves the interests of the US) is to establish a Islamic caliphate extending into Western China. (Michel Chossudovsky, America’s War on Terrorism, Global Research, Montreal, 2005, Chapter 2).

HOMEGROWN TERRORISTS

23 The Terrorists R Us: While the US is the unspoken architect of the Islamic State, Obama’s holy mandate is to protect America against ISIL attacks.

24 The homegrown terrorist threat is a fabrication. It is promoted by Western governments and the media with a view to repealing civil liberties and installing a police state. The terror attacks by alleged jihadists and terror warnings are invariably staged events. They are used to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.

In turn, the arrests, trials and sentences of “Islamic terrorists” sustain the legitimacy of America’s Homeland Security State and law enforcement apparatus, which has become increasingly militarized.

The ultimate objective is to instill in the minds of millions of Americans that the enemy is real and the U.S. Administration will protect the lives of its citizens.

25. The “counter-terrorism” campaign against the Islamic State has contributed to the demonization of Muslims, who in the eyes of Western public opinion are increasingly associated with the jihadists.

26 Anybody who dares to question the validity of the “Global War on Terrorism” is branded a terrorist and subjected to the anti-terrorist laws.

The ultimate objective of the “Global War on Terrorism” is to subdue the citizens, totally depoliticize social life in America, prevent people from thinking and conceptualizing, from analyzing facts and challenging the legitimacy of the inquisitorial social order which rules America.

The Obama Administration has imposed a diabolical consensus with the support of its allies, not to mention the complicit role of the United Nations Security Council. The Western media has embraced the consensus; it has described the Islamic State as an independent entity, an outside enemy which threatens the Western World.

Forced disappearances have become commonplace throughout Mexico as a result of the so-called drug war in the country.

Thousands of mothers of the forcibly disappeared marched through Mexico City Sunday, to honor their missing children and to demand their safe return.

This is the fourth year in a row that the march to coincide with Mother's Day in Mexico and many parts of the world was held, with participants chanting slogans demanding the safe return of their children, such as, “Why do we search? Because we love them.”

The march ended with a rally at the Angel of Independence.

Mexicans have been living with an epidemic of forced disappearances since the outbreak of a violence between drugs cartels as well as the government.

The issue was placed in the spotlight after the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers' training college in the southern state of Guerrero.

Seven months have passed since the students were alleged arrested by local police and turned over to an organized crime group.

The parents of the missing students continue to demand their safe return and have publicly questioned the government's claim that says the students were killed and their bodies burned.

The effects on U.S. soldiers pale in comparison to the suffering we inflicted on the Vietnamese in their own country. We ruined their lives, their economy, and their country.

Thursday, April 30, is the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam, with the North Vietnamese capture of the South Vietnam capital, Saigon. It marked the end of the U.S. decade-long war in Vietnam.

By the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, over 58,000 U.S. military service members were dead and more than 300,000 had been wounded. For many U.S. military who lived to return to the United States, it meant surviving the after-effects, what we then called “post-Vietnam syndrome,” and now refer to as post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD: flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety.

But the effects on U.S. soldiers pale in comparison to the suffering we inflicted on the Vietnamese in their own country. We ruined their lives, their economy, and their country. U.S. service members — and their Australian, New Zealand, Thai, and South Korean allies — killed between 1.5 and 3.6 million Vietnamese people. We napalmed their countryside, and sprayed more than 18 million gallons of Agent Orange dioxin on the countryside, the results of which continue to affect generations today.

For most of us who lived and served during the Vietnam War era, the Fall of Saigon is a date for remembrance of our personal and national losses. It also heralds that which brought us into the anti-Vietnam War movement.

I enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a 19-year-old in September 1965, just six months after the United States deployed ground troops to fight in Vietnam. I thought it was the right thing to do. A couple of my high school chums were already casualties. My grandfathers were both Army veterans and my parents had served in the navy in World War II. As was true for so many kids my age back then, with two previous world wars and the recent Korean War, it seemed most families had military backgrounds.

I went in as an apolitical Nebraska Republican, who believed that I could make a career in the military. With my squadron I had two deployments to Iceland, literally and figuratively on the opposite side of the planet from my colleagues in Vietnam.With the deployments adding up to 14 months, I came to understand the stress and PTSD faced by active duty personnel and veterans of all wars, but especially unpopular and controversial wars.

Around the fifth month of my deployment, guys who were buddies would get into fights over the slightest irritation. In our deployment in 1969 we were extended. We were continuously tracking a Soviet nuclear sub and had a plane over or near the sub at all times. For those of us on flight crews, it meant 14-hour arduous days, without rest.

Getting extended put those who were already stressed near the edge, developing some psychological and behavioral aberrations. Meanwhile, I was questioning the reasons U.S. soldiers were fighting and dying in Vietnam.

We were told that the Geneva Accords and the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) Treaty — signed in 1954 by most nations in the region, and also the U.S. and Australia — obligated U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. That we had to fight to prevent the Communist takeover of South Vietnam and the spread of communism around the world.

By my 21st birthday, I had my doubts about the altruism of the operation. I had read the accords and the treaty. I had lost close friends to the war. It seemed to me that the real underlying goals of the U.S. war were political and economic hegemony and natural resources, such as oil.

Only halfway into my four-year enlistment, I became an anti-Vietnam War activist. For me it was the anti-war movement that guided me when I got out in November 1969 and ever since.

On Monday, May 25, the United States will celebrate Memorial Day. Since soon after the American Civil War ended in 1865, this has been a day to remember and honor service members who have died. This year — also the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Vietnam War — U.S. leaders are looking to resurrect patriotic support of that ill-begotten war. The Department of Defense has mounted a heavily funded initiative to convince younger U.S. generations that the Vietnam War was a noble enterprise.

Included in their efforts is a well-funded website, “United States of America – Vietnam War Commemoration," as well as plans for annual celebrations, such as Memorial Day events around the country. They are planning to tell their version of the war for the next 10 years, representing the 10 years of the Vietnam War.

The promotion of such patriotic sentiment for a war that was, by all accounts, a disaster, is dangerous in an era when future wars are being considered in countries such as Iran, Yemen, Somalia, and planned out of public sight. Those of us who are veterans for peace believe that the Vietnam War was a grievous mistake if not an horrific crime. And that is why Veterans For Peace has decided to meet the governments’ campaign with our own — Vietnam War Full Disclosure.

Vietnam Full Disclosure is calling on concerned citizens, who were seared by this war, to each send a letter to The Wall, the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. These victims will share their memories of this war and its impact on their loved ones, while expressing their concerns over future wars. On Memorial Day, Vietnam veterans will present these letters to the Vietnam Memorial and read excerpts from some of the letters.

As Veterans, our legacy includes these commemorations and the resistance to wars present and future. It is a legacy of awareness and resistance, of ensuring that the society and system that sends young people to fight their wars understands the absolute duty to care for them when they return. It is a legacy of tolerance, diplomacy, respect and dignity to help us right the wrongs of imperialism and global economic domination for the benefit of the few to the expense of the many; a legacy of teaching and helping younger generations continue the fight for all of us, now and into the future.

The development of a legacy of peace is ongoing and that must be the legacy of the Vietnam War.

Jim Baldridge,

USN Jan ’66-Nov ‘69

VP-24 ATN2, Flight Crew 9

VFP Chapter 105, the Phil Berrigan Memorial Chapter

See www.vietnamfulldisclosure.org for details on Vietnam Full Disclosure, including ways to participate between now and Memorial Day.

]]>EnglishThu, 30 Apr 2015 18:01:51 -0500Vietnam Celebrates 40 Years after the End of the Warhttp://discrepando.com/english/item/7040-vietnam-celebrates-40-years-after-the-end-of-the-war
http://discrepando.com/english/item/7040-vietnam-celebrates-40-years-after-the-end-of-the-war

Over 3 million Vietnamese civilians and fighters were killed during the U.S.-led invasion of the Asian country.

Thousands of Vietnamese gathered Thursday in the city once known as Saigon to mark 40 years since Vietnamese soldiers took back the city, ending the bloody and divisive U.S. occupation.

Solidiers and traditional performers marched through the streets of Ho Chi Minh – once known as Saigon, the former capital of South Vietnam – is a special victory parade marking the day.

People started to gather at dawn to watch the day's events marking the end of the Vietnam-U.S. war and the reunification of the country.

The city was covered in red banners, with some of the reading, “Long Live the Glorious Communist Party of Vietnam.”

People started to gather in Ho Chi Minh at dawn to watch the parade, said teleSUR correspondent Vincent Montagud.

Men, women and children were also featured in the well choreographed display since it was important that the day's events represent all Vietnamese society, organizers told Montagud. “When I was dancing, I felt the entire atmosphere here today. We celebrate victory and it is very important to me.

That's why I wanted to participate in this event,” local volunteer Hong Anh Tu told teleSUR. Over 3 million Vietnamese fighters and civilians were killed and some 58,000 U.S. soldiers died during the Vietnam War, after the U.S. invaded the country to stop the communist ambitions of then President Ho Chi Minh, at a time when the Cold War was at its peak.

Today, the U.S. and Vietnam have friendly diplomatic relations, while the U.S. has become the southeast Asian nation's largest foreign investor.

Sixteen people killed in cold blood by the Mexican Federal Police; unarmed people of an auto-defense movement – in January 2015; just discovered by a team of investigative journalists.

Mexicans well remember the forced disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students of last September, unarmed students of a college that caters to the rural poor, who were protesting the government’s education reform which would make school unaffordable for the poor. Their killing was provoked by the police in connivance with drug cartels.

An outrage – tolerated and even supported as an oppressive action against anybody seeking their rights – by Mexicans highest authorities.

Such oppressive police tactics around the globe are clearly the result of the violent police conduct in the US, either directly by training, or indirectly influenced by their brutal behavior – ‘if the empire can, we can too’.

While he professes the contrary, targeted police killings, allegedly to fight drugs, but with the real purpose of suppressing dissent, has increased drastically since the neoliberal President Peña Nieto took office in 2012.

Mexicans need to know that their police has been trained by the United States of America, the country that screams freedom and liberty at every corner of the globe – lies and deceptions, everywhere one looks; the most abusive and criminal nation in the world; the only rogue nation over the last 100 years, indeed an ‘exceptional nation’, as Obama and his cronies like to think of their country – a government dominated by an elite of hypocrites, supported by an equally murderous media which has prostituted its commitment to truth for lies and falsehoods to the elites of empire.

The criminal behavior of police and military forces throughout the world is the direct or indirect product of the US. They train armies and police in their 'client' states to assure oppression whenever there is a chance that people may claim their civil rights. This is what empire does.

The police chief in charge of the squadron that murdered the 16 unarmed protesters in January, as well as the one responsible for the Ayotzinapa disappearances, were nominated and are supported by President Enrique Peña Nieto. The President himself was literally implanted by empire, because Peña Nieto would not have been elected by Mexicans, an honest and noble people, other than by fraud - fraud paid for, planned and instigated by Washington. Only a puppet ‘authority’ can tolerate these murderous acts against unarmed people, and only because he knows he has support at the highest level - actually at the level of Washington.

Mexicans - be aware!

Latin Americans all over the Sub-Continent BEWARE!

Look at Europe! - The Old Continent dotted with puppets, with stooges of Washington; non-leaders that are drawing Europe into misery, first with lies; if that doesn't work, the atrocious boots of NATO will follow, either as an armed direct intervention, or as one instigating a war with Russia which will undoubtedly unfold in -where else - Europe. That would be the third time in 100 years - wars provoked by the Anglo-Saxon empire – and Europe reduced to rubble – to be rebuilt by empire to fuel its economy.

President Obama is just about discovering that he has 'neglected' his 'backyard' - and now is doing everything possible to take it back, including by training your sovereign countries’ police and army. Just look at Venezuela, look at the threats- some tacit some direct, but all real – on Bolivia and Ecuador, on Brazil; all hidden as local subversions or disguised as the uncovering of corruption. These activities are the brainchild of nefarious Washington 'think tanks' (sic) which are planning to dismantle and destroy the social developments that have taken hold over the last 15-20 years throughout the sub-continent of Latin America and the Caribbean, the only population and societies, other than those of China and Russia, that have resisted the merciless onslaught of empire throughout the world.

Brothers in solidarity, don't let your achievements, often dearly paid for with blood, be taken away. They are yours to stay! Don't fall into traps of lies, deceptions and aggression.

Take back your countries where they have been taken over by empire.

Empire will not let go - until and unless it is defeated. And defeated it will be. It is gradually sinking into internal disarray and into international discredit; into an abyss of darkness, from where only ashes will rise.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik News, the Voice of Russia / Ria Novosti, TeleSur, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe.

The gun debate in the USA has, for centuries, really been about race and the dominaiton of the black population. ​A front page story in the Washington Post struck me. “GOP field backs gun rights with both barrels,” read the title of the David A. Fahrenthold piece on March 29. As one would expect, the potential candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are jumping all over themselves to show how ‘pro-gun’ they are.

In the USA we have discussions about guns that pretend to be based on history, but actually miss certain key features. In so doing, the heart and soul of the gun debate is overlooked and the issue devolves into questions of morality and gun safety.

The gun issue in the USA is related to history but not particularly to the 2nd Amendment (the supposed right to bear arms). The debate precedes the 2nd Amendment by more than a century and it revolves around settlers and race.

The gun debate in the USA started in the 1600s and, while there were always matters of safety and hunting, the key question was actually one of who had the right and authority to possess weapons. The second question centered on why the centrality of weapon possession at all.

The settlement of North America, and specifically the original thirteen colonies, was not a non-violent act. It represented an invasion. There immediately arose the question of the protection of the invaders, i.e., the colonists. Thus, weapons, at all costs, had to be kept out of the hands of the indigenous population—the Native Americans or First Nations.

Severe penalties were created for any settler who sold or traded weapons to the Native Americans. This notoriety made its way into the popular media over the years with stories about so-called mavericks who supplied Native Americans with weaponry.

During much of the colonial era, and into the 19th century, by the way, this form of activity was frequently associated in the minds of much of the white public with Irish dissidents who were in opposition to the British colonization of Ireland.

Weaponry was also essential for handling an ‘internal’ problem within the emerging settler state: indentured servants and slaves.

The 1600s was a period of regular uprisings carried out by indentured servants and slaves. The indentured servant workforce was originally composed of Africans, Europeans and some Native Americans. It was the turmoil during this period that drove the colonial ruling elite to identify the need to splinter the workforce in order to retain power. In that context arose the modern usage of “race,” based largely upon the successful experience of the British in the occupation and suppression of the indigenous population in Ireland.

Over the course of the 1600s, indentured servitude evolved into indentured servitude for Europeans laborers and slavery-for-life for Africans. In order to guarantee that the Africans and Europeans did not conspire together, there were major penalties for any sort of ‘cross-racial’ cooperation among the laboring peoples. There was, additionally, the question of the gun.

One of the chief distinctions between the condition of the European and that of the African was that Africans could not own or possess weapons. Possessing weapons was a ‘privilege’ of whiteness and with this privilege came an awesome responsibility: serve in the mission to expand European settlements (and control) over North America; remove the Native Americans from their land; and ensure that Africans remained suppressed in slavery.

Thus, no matter how poor a European might have been and no matter how badly they might have been treated by the Euro-Americans (white) ruling elite, at the end of the day the white poor and laboring classes grew to understand that they would not be as bad off as the Native American and African. They also grew to understand that by putting on the racial uniform of “whiteness,” they could have a role in one of the most notorious expeditions in history, despite the fact that that uniform permanently imprisoned them in a humiliating and subordinate status.

Gun ownership in the USA, then, was a defining feature of whiteness. It, therefore, cannot be compared to gun ownership in most other parts of the world—with the exception of nation-states that started as settler colonies, e.g., South Africa. It was a trophy suggesting that the owner was part of a ruling establishment, separate and apart from the various barbarian races.

The settler origin of gun ownership and its relationship to the enslavement of Africans, helps one to understand the contradictory response among many whites to the possession of weapons by people of color. In fact, it demonstrates that the gun controversy is not and has never been about the 2nd Amendment.

The possession of weapons by people of color, whether Native Americans, Chicanos or African Americans, to name three groups, is not seen by many, if not most whites as a matter of “rights,” but instead as a source of fear.

When, in 1967, the Black Panther Party marched on the California state capital with unloaded shotguns, it sent shivers up the spines of many whites, perhaps bringing to mind the possible reemergence of Nat Turner.

Compare that with the armed actions by white, right-wing populists in defense of Nevadan Cliven Bundy in his dispute with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Bundy, charged by the BLM with violating grazing rights, was supported by armed volunteers in his confrontation with federal agents. There is little doubt that had Bundy been of color and the armed supporters been of color, that there would have been more of a reenactment of the MOVE confrontation in Philadelphia or the attack on the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee.

Yet, in the Bundy case, the appearance of armed, white, right-wing supporters was largely treated as a near legitimate exercise in both weapon’s possession and freedom of protest.

The embrace of gun ownership and display by the Republican candidates and potential candidates for the Presidency is certainly an example of typical Republican opportunism. But it is actually more than that. It is a symbolic linkage with the largely unspoken theme that is central to US history and has existed as a white, right-wing apparition during the Obama administration: the U.S. is—or at least should be—a white republic. The rest of us are guests; tolerated at best, despised at worst.

And the guns? Well, they are a reminder that a portion of the population has to be prepared to stand firm against the barbarians who are chipping away at the edifice.

Roberta Jacobson was surprised not more countries defended the U.S. sanctions and decree claiming Venezuela a threat. The U.S. sub-secretary for Latin America admitted Friday that she was “disappointed” by the reactions of the Latin American countries to the sanctions and the “national security threat” decree recently adopted by Washington against Venezuela. “I am disappointed that there were not more countries to defend (the sanctions).

They were not made to harm Venezuelans or the Venezuelan government,” the diplomat explained. Speaking at a conference, Roberta Jacobson also criticised the solidarity shown by Latin American countries for Venezuela.

“The tone that Latin American leaders are using demonizes the United States as if it were the source of Venezuela's problems, and this makes it hard for us to proceed pragmatically,” the politician said.

The mounting hostility from the U.S towards Venezuela is likely to be one of the most hotly debated themes at the Summit, due to take place in Panama later this month. U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to attend.

RELATED: US

Threats on Venezuela Many high profile Latin Americans have come out in support of the democratically elected government of President Nicolas Maduro, including former Uruguayan president, Jose Mujica, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu. In March all 33 members of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) expressed their opposition to the U.S. government move, with other regional bodies including the United Nations of South America (UNASUR) doing likewise.

In the latest sign of the hostility that the U.S. approach has provoked, it was revealed Friday that at least five million tweets across 105 countries have been counted on Twitter demanding the repealing of Obama's meddling decree.